SPLEEN is the personal blog of Stephen Judd

All posts tagged "tagging"

You may have gathered that I spend a lot of time on the water's edge. I do get a lot of pleasure from snooping small sea creatures. It takes me back to being a very small boy, investigating rock pools with my Dad. And it's amazing what you can see, even in somewhere as urban and polluted as the lagoon at Frank Kitt's, which is full of different kinds of marine life.

However I have been pretty depressed recently with the news about plastic in the ocean. And I felt all the gloomier as I realised, cycling along Oriental Parade, just how befouled with plastic the harbour is. I defy you, from the shore at least, to find any patch of water or beach or rocks that doesn't have multiple plastic bags adorning it. Whenever I am at the beach, I mechanically pick up all the plastic I walk past, until my hands are full, and that happens pretty quickly these days. It is getting to the point where I feel a momentary rush of irrational hatred when I see plastic drifting across the road into the sea.

As for people who pillage our shellfish beds: they are real vandals who make me far angrier than taggers. Tagging is temporary and repairable damage, but a cockle bed is a food resource for an ecosystem and a human community that ought to last for ever.